The late-Holocene records of sediment provenance/weathering in the Wular Lake catchment, Northwest Himalaya

The Wular Lake (area ~189 km²) in the Kashmir Valley (area ~16,000 km²) is fed by the Jhelum River, which is a large Himalayan tributary of the Indus River. The lake catchment seasonally receives precipitation from tropical (Indian Summer Monsoon, ISM) and subtropical (Western Disturbances, WD) moisture sources. Thus, the lake sediments provide a unique opportunity to explore the high-resolution archive of the synoptic-scale weathering intensity and pattern in the Northwest Himalaya under past hydroclimatic conditions. In this study, radiogenic Sr and Nd isotope compositions and lithic fractions (sand, silt, and clay) have been determined on detrital phases of a 2.2 m long sediment core retrieved from the Wular Lake. The ¹⁴C-AMS chronology of this core presents the sedimentary records of the last 4.2 ka. The Sr and Nd isotope data indicate that the lake sediments deposited during the late-Holocene are mostly sourced from the Tethyan Himalaya rather than other major lithologies. The marginal downcore variations of ±1.5 ε_Nd unit (except two anomalous datapoints with large uncertainties at 0.8 ka and 2.0 ka) reveal no major shifts in the sediment provenance during the late-Holocene. On the other hand, the significant downcore variations are observed in ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr (>0.001–0.004) showing well-resolved periods of higher and lower values than the late-Holocene average. The ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr data unbiased by the grain-size sorting and carbonate contents seem to indicate a temporal dominance of chemical and physical modes of silicate weathering in the Northwest Himalaya before and after ~2 ka, respectively. Interestingly, an abrupt shift in the ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr data during the Little Ice Age (~0.4–0.1 ka) reveals a multi-decadal response of the silicate weathering intensity in synchrony with the northern hemisphere temperature anomaly.